1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to electrical computers, telecommunications, telephonic communications, electrical communications and, more particularly, to messaging systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The term “voice mail” is often utilized to refer to systems wherein parties may leave spoken messages for one another that are stored and retrieved at a later time. Voice mail is also utilized to refer to spoken messages attached to electronic mail communications.
Telephone answering systems are an example of a voice mail system. In a conventional telephone answering system a user records a greeting that is replayed to incoming callers if the user does not answer the telephone. Generally, the answering system allows an incoming caller to record a spoken message that may be retrieved and listened to at a later time.
Although widely utilized, telephone answering systems have not advanced to a significant degree. The United States patent literature discloses several approaches to improving telephone answering systems and their components. U.S. Pat. No. 5,278,894 to Shaw, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, discloses a method and apparatus for providing customized greeting messages from a switch based voice messaging service. U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,355, to Lim et al., the disclosure of which is also hereby incorporated herein by reference, discloses a caller-ID device and/or integrated caller-ID and answering machine device which is configurable 1) to play pre-recorded announcement for the user when the caller ID information received over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) corresponds to stored information indicating an important caller; 2) to play a pre-recorded “block-the-blocker” outgoing message for the caller when a blocked-caller-ID code is received; and/or 3) to play a pre-recorded “reject call” outgoing message for the caller when the caller-ID information corresponds to stored information indicating an undesirable caller.
There are several methods and products that allow the user of a telephone to identify the source of an incoming telephone call. U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,038, to Kraus et al., the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, discloses a method for identifying the source of a communication, including the steps of: receiving the communication on a calling line; identifying the calling line number associated with the calling line; accessing a database to provide an identity for the source by finding a database entry corresponding to the calling line number; announcing this identity to the source; and requesting confirmation. U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,158, to Romero, the disclosure of which is also hereby incorporated herein by reference, discloses a caller ID call-back device that allows a user to automatically place telephone calls to selected directory numbers using several dialing plans.
It would be advantageous to have a telephone answering system that allows a user to provide a personalized caller specific greeting. For example, a home telephone user may wish to inform a contractor that the user will be home at a certain hour in order to let the contractor in. The home telephone user, however, would not want to leave a general answering machine message informing all callers that the user would be away from home and returning at a particular time. A personalized caller specific greeting system would allow the home telephone user's answering system to respond to a call from the contractor with a message such as “Thank you for your call, Ms. Jones will be home at 4:00 PM to let you into the house,” while responding to other calls with a general message such as “We cannot answer the phone right now, please leave a message for us after the tone.” Similarly, a business telephone user may wish to leave personalized caller specific greetings for specific clients etc. As will be understood by those of ordinary skill in the art, there are a large number of potential uses for such a personalized caller specific greeting system.
In addition to telephones, in recent years, the number of communication devices and their use, has increased dramatically. Examples of communication devices include telephones, analog and digital cellular phones, pages, wireless email devices, personal digital assistants and the like. Many such devices are able to directly access the world wide web and/or corporate intranet sites.
Prior telephone answering systems often required a user to physically interact with an answering machine in order to configure the machine. Alternatively, several types of answering machines were generally configurable via telephone. It would be advantageous, however, to have a telephone answering system that was configurable via an electronic communications pathway such as the world wide web. It would be further advantageous if such a telephone answering system provided for personalized caller specific greetings.